J. B. Kabri le Tatoué Dessin publié dans le livre de Von Langsdorff
Joseph KABRIS, était né à Bordeaux. – Sachant qu’on n’est pas prophète dans son pays, il se fait matelot et part. Ayant été capturé, on le jette dans les prisons d’Angleterre. Il obtient la faveur de monter à bord d’un bâtiment baleinier qui se dirigeait vers la mer du sud. Ce bâtiment fait naufrage, va se briser sur les côtes de Noukahiva, (îles Marquises) dans le Grand Océan, et notre bordelais tombe dans les mains des anthropophages. Le feu est allumé, la broche va tourner, le casse-tête est levé sur Kabris, quand la jeune Valmaïca fille du roi des sauvages, belle comme on l’est aux îles Marquises, pousse un cri de grâce : le pauvre Joseph est sauvé, il se précipite dans le bras de sa libératrice qui, sans plus de façon l’accepte pour époux.
Le roi de Noukahiva quoique mangeur d’hommes, était bon prince ; il prend son gendre en affection, lui fait cadeau d’un riche manteau royal d’écorce d’arbre doublé de fine mousse, et, avec air de bonté qui le caractérise, le tatoue lui-même sur la figure, sur le corps et partout, puis il le nomme grand juge de tout le pays.
Kabris s’acquittent admirablement de ses fonctions : il fait garrotter et battre les uns, griller les autres, ceux-ci sont jetés à la mer, ceux-là écorchés vifs, enfin jamais justice ne fut mieux faite ; le brigandage diminue, les mœurs s’adoucissent, Kabris est au comble de la gloire et du bonheur ; Valmaïca apprivoisée l’adore, et cinq ou six bambins tatoués s’élèvent autour de lui.
Un jour qu’il s’était endormi dans une de ses forêts et qu’il y rêvait délicieusement, le chevalier Krunsenstern, capitaine russe en expédition dans ces parages, et à la recherche des objets curieux, l’aperçoit, le fait garrotter, conduire à coups de knout dans son vaisseau et l’emmène à St-Pétersbourg. La fille du roi se tordit les bras, pleura longtemps et pleure peut-être encore.
A St-Pétersbourg, Kabris à qui l’on n’avait pas permis comme cela se fait quelque fois, de vendre ses domaines en partant, devint simplement professeur de natation. Encore s’il avait pu avoir un seul instant seulement, le capitaine Krusenstern pour élève ! Il lui eut bientôt appris à plonger dans les eaux du Styx ; mais il n’éprouva pas cette douce satisfaction.
En 1817, à l’époque où quelques prisonniers français, tristes débris de nos formidables armées, quittèrent les déserts de la Russie pour revoir leur patrie, Kabris profita de l’occasion pour revenir en France. A Paris, ce genre de monarque anthropophage faisant quelque rapprochement entre sa grandeur déchue et la restauration des Tuileries, et croyant peut-être que le roi était un peu son cousin, chercha et parvînt à voir Louis XVIII qui se contenta de lui faire donner quelque argent. Ayant eu ensuite accès près du roi de Prusse, il n’en obtint aussi qu’un léger secours. Revenu de sa méprise, désirant se rendre à Bordeaux pour delà, s’il le pouvait un jour, aller reprendre sa femme et ses dignités à Noukahiva, il mit, pour se faire un fond, la curiosité publique à contribution. Il se fit voir à Paris, au Cabinet des illusions. Le pauvre diable ne pouvait mieux choisir, ce n’était plus que là qu’il devait en trouver.
Jusqu’à présent ces faits ne touchent pas à nos contrées, mais voici : Kabris continuant le cours de ses infortunes et ne gagnant que ce qu’il fallait pour vivre, tomba de ville en ville à Valenciennes. Il y vint en septembre 1822 pour s’y montrer à l’époque de la foire. Ce membre d’une famille royale, dont les malheurs et les étranges destinées n’étaient pas assez connus, attirait peu de monde ; tandis qu’on se rendait en foule aux baraques de la ménagerie, de la jeune fille pesant 400 livres et du veau à trois têtes, ses voisins.
Ce fut alors, le 22 septembre, que je vis Kabris. Il était bien triste. Il parlait avec intérêt de sa femme, de ses enfants, même du beau-père ; il n’avait pas encore perdu tout espoir de les revoir, j’aurais désiré obtenir de lui de longs détails ; mais il était fort malade, et souffrait tant qu’il ne pouvait parler qu’avec beaucoup de peine : circonstance contrariante, car Kabris, et ce n’était pas le premier gascon à qui pareille chose soit arrivée, s’exprimait avec un air de vérité qui inspirait la confiance.
Le soir même de ce jour se sentant plus mal, il fit appeler un médecin. La mort n’en continua pas moins à aiguiser sa faux ; Valmaïca n’était plus là pour détourner le casse-tête, et le grand juge de Noukahiva rendit l’âme à Valenciennes, le 23 septembre 1822 à 5 heures du matin, âgé de 42 ans.
Ces détails ne sont pas oiseux ; ils pourraient devenir précieux pour l’épouse et les enfants de Kabris, si cette notice tombait entre leurs mains ; or il n’est pas impossible que les Archives aient un jour des abonnés aux îles Marquises.
Cette réflexion nous conduit à dire un mot de la sépulture de Kabris. Un amateur de choses rares avait fait quelques démarches pour avoir la peau de ce personnage, afin de le faire empailler. L’autorité informée de cette fantaisie, craignant qu’on exhumât clandestinement l’ex-ministre pour l’écorcher, prit ses mesures. On venait d’enterrer un vieillard de l’hospice de Valenciennes, Kabris fut mis au-dessus de lui, et sur Kabris on plaça le cadavre d’un autre vieillard du même hospice1. Ces renseignements deviendraient bien intéressants si les illustres descendants de Kabris, demandaient un jour sa cendre à l’Europe. A. L.
In « Les hommes et les choses du nord de la France et du midi de la Belgique publiés à Valenciennes au bureau des Archives du Nord N°9 – 1829 » ;
1 Promenade au cimetière de Valenciennes, par Aimé Leroy, page 75
The case of the French sailor Joseph Kabris (1779?-1822) is less well known and reveals another side of the European fascination with the exotic. His adventures are narrated in a booklet of about fifteen pages, Précis historique et véritable du séjour e Jh. Kabris, natif de Bordeaux, dans les îles de Mendoça, situées dans l’Océan Pacifique. The misfortunes of Kabris began at the age of fifteen, when he was shipwrecked off the coast of France. Taken prisoner by the English, he was held in a prison hulk at Portsmouth for fifteen months. In May 1795 he embarked on a whaleboat, and was shipwrecked for a second time near Santa Cristina (Tahuata) in the Marquesas Islands. He was a strong swimmer, and managed to save himself as well as an English companion named Robarts, who would later become his frère ennemi or ‘brother enemy’. The pair was found by a group of Marquesans who took them to Nuka Hiva, where they were condemned to death. They escaped the death sentence thanks to the daughter of the chief, with whom Kabris married and had children.
As son-in-law he received his first tattoo, a blackening of the skin around his left eye, a design called mata epo or ‘shitty eye. This tattoo is represented in Langsdorf’s portrait of Kabris. The next markings he received were suns on the upper and lower eyelids of the right eye, ‘that the people call mehama and which give me the title of judge’. In one version of his account Kabris spécifies that it was the chief himself who executed the first markings, the designs then being completed by a tattoo artist. In another version of the text he writes that they were not welcomed by the people until they had met the chief. He took them as friends, and after four months organised a tattooing ceremony, after which they could marry.
Having been integrated into the Marquesan tribe, Kabris fought for them in their battles with other groups. In one skirmish, he skilfully wounded an enemy chief with his sling and thereafter received a tattoo on his breast, becoming, according to his own account, ‘Chief of the guard and viceroy of the tribe’. He wrote that he lived happily m his royal family, enjoying the friendship of everyone. Kabris never mentioned Robarts. He was also tattooed, but lived on the opposite side of the island, in Tiahoe Bay.
On the 7 May 1804 a Russian ship arrived in Tiahoe Bay. Robarts offered his services to von Krusenstern, the captain of the vessel, and told him that he had been abandoned on the island by his former crew members for refusing to participate in a plot. He added that the French should not be trusted. The hatred evident between Kabris and Robarts, two Europeans so far from home, drove von Krusenstern to reflect upon the hostility of nations towards one another. The captain then met Kabris, whose good relations with the Marquesans proved useful. Langsdorf, a member of the crew, remarked that the Frenchman had a better knowledge of the island than his English cohabitant. The evening before the ship’s departure, Kabris was invited on board for dinner alone. Drunk on the liquor served to him by the captain, he fell asleep, and later awoke to find that the ship had set sail, and was now in the middle of the ocean. Whether it was to rid Robarts of his enemy, or because, as von Krusenstern later claimed, a sudden wind obliged him to leave, Kabris found himself removed from his adopted homeland. ‘The captain employed ail the ways to quiet me’, he wrote, ‘he told me that I was kidnapped to be presented to the Tsar Alexander as valuable object to stimulate his curiosity and to prove to him he had visited the people of remote islands’.
Kabris disembarked at Kamchatka at the end of 1804 (although this is not mentioned by von Krusenstern in his account) and travelled to St Petersburg to be presented at the Court of the Tzar. Alexander admired his tattoos and compensated him for the ‘inconvenience’ he had suffered. Although Kabris expressed a desire to visit his parents in Bordeaux, he was still in Russia m 1817, employed as a swimming instructor in the Naval School at Kronshtadt. In the same year he was received at the court of the French king Louis XVIII, who gave him some money intended to pay for a return voyage to the Marquesas.
The royal gift was insufficient, however, and Kabris began to exhibit his tattoos in the Cabinet of Illusions in Bordeaux and in other fairs around France in order to earn money for his passage. As an accompaniment to his exhibition, he sold a booklet printed in Paris and Rouen of which only four known examples survived. Three are in the National Library in Paris, and one in Geneva (there may be a further copy in Grenoble, but research in the two libraries of this town failed to uncover it). In addition, portraits of Kabris exist with his tattoos rendered in more or less exact detail. According to Picot-Mallet, who annotated the Geneva booklet, he was ‘a good sized man, very well built, with an agreeable physiognomy, a bit blackened by the climate, who intelligently answers any question which one asks him’. Kabris died on 23 September 1822 in Valenciennes, after a rapid decline into sickness and misery. Aimé Leroy, a local journalist who interviewed him just before his death, wrote : ‘This member of a royal family, whose misfortunes and strange fate were not well known, attracted few people, while the crowd flocked to the menagerie to see the 400 pound girl and the three-headed calf’. Leroy also recounts that when Kabris died an amateur collector of curiosities attempted to obtain his skin in order to stuff and mount it for display. His corpse was buried between two old men to protect it from such attentions. Leroy wrote : ‘This information could become very interesting if the illustrious descendants of Kabris one day demanded the return of his ashes to Europe’. The narrative of the skin-man merits some remarks. If his sad and romantic story can inspire an novel or a film, we can also see it as the intricate layering of different levels of captivity, symptoms of the occidental approach to the exotic body. Tattooed skin, engravings and narrative form an image in which illusion, theatre and power over the foreign body of an other are revealed.
Ahutoru and Omai were taken as strange bodies, bodies ‘wrapped in images’ (in reference to Alfred Gell). With unintelligible signs inscribed upon their skin, the image of their bodies was easily manipulated, enabling the creation of a ‘mediatic’ illusion, useful to a representation, to a fashion of tattooing (the word ‘tattoo’ originated from this time). The fascination Europeans had for tattoos could be read as symptomatic of the medium of the tattoo itself. Juliet Fleming says :
Caused by the introduction of a foreign body under the skin, the tattoo marks the self as foreign. It consequently stands as a ready figure for the border skirmishing that defines conceptual relations not only between the inside and the outside of the body, but also between the inside and the outside of social groups.
Kabris was a sailor, travelling the océans for a living. He did not leave France in search of an exotic dream. When he returned to Europe his Marquesan identity was a novelty in Russia, which had only recently ventured into the Pacific, a fact which may explain the motive for his capture. When he arrived in France, however, the myth of the Noble Savage had ceased to fire the imagination – it was later revived by the painter Gauguin. Kabris turned the myth inside out. Unlike the Tahitians, he could not be seen as an incarnation of the myth and, paradoxically, his tattooed skin laid it bare. In contrast to Reynold’s portrait of Omai, in which the Tahitian is pictured in antique draperies, Kabris, a Marquesan, appears as not more than a veneer of wonder and delight. His tattoos define him as somewhere between the low-class disreputable sailor and the savage. In Bordeaux’s Cabinet of Illusions and in the fairs, he was a protagonist with and without costume, incongruous.
To be captive is to forfeit one’s power. Kabris claimed that he was a member of the Marquesan nobility, as indicated in the engravings.
His use of titles should be considered in the context of France at the time of the Restoration. Unfortunately ail his powers were compromised. The armour of his tattoos stripped him of his authority. The imprimatur of his Marquesan identity marked him as a stranger, his biographical trophies relegated to the status of a stuffed trophy for an amateur collector of the bizarre. He was covered and trapped by his own skin, by unreadable patterns. His honourable disfigurement was the mark only of the high status of a Marquesan chief. He had become a monster in his own society and ended up with the monsters in a menagerie of anatomical and morbid curiosities.
It seems that the only power available to him lay in his own narrative. Inspired by the myth of a Pacific paradise, he modestly describes his experience as a life of happiness, also recounting tales of cannibalism (a practice in which, he makes clear, he did not participate).
In addition, his narrative includes interesting descriptions of Marquesan art and life. Even if the facts of his departure from Nuka Hiva conflict in the different versions of his story, it caused a literary stir. A sentimental poem, ‘Le départ de Joseph Kabris de l’île de Nouka Hiva’, signed M. C., is attached to the copy of his booklet in the Geneva library. Aimé Leroy described the capture thus :
One day, while he was sleeping in the forest and dreaming of delicious things, Krusenstern, a Russian captain who was exploring this country and researching curiosities, saw him, took him prisoner, and conducted him to his ship, whipping him along the way and sent him to Saint Petersburg. The daughter of the king wrung her hands, and cried for so long that she is perhaps still crying.
The life of Kabris was not unique. One can find a number of examples of Europeans who lived – willingly or unwillingly – among different oceanic peoples during the early contact period, such as that of William Mariner in Tonga, and Barnet Burns in New Zealand.
In Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific de Barbara Creed, Jeanette Hoorn
Publié par Pluto Press Australia, 2001 ISBN 1864031840, 9781864031843 – 296 pages
http://books.google.fr/books?id=Y2G69AgxqxQC&dq=KABRIS+ROUEN&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0
Body Trade explores the history of the South Pacific traffic in human bodies from the eighteenth century to the present. Scholars from art history, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, and film examine the ‘captive body’ as it is represented in a range of media – from Captain Cook’s Journals and Melville’s novels to contemporary painting, popular culture, and such movies as Jedda, Meet Me In St Louis and The Murmuring. Revisiting Europe’s colonial project in the Pacific, Body Trade exposes myths surrounding the trade in heads, cannibalism, captive white women, the display of indigenous people in fairs and circuses, the stolen generations, the ‘comfort’ women and the making of the exotic/erotic body. This is a lively and intriguing contribution to the study of the postcolonial body.
Les Îles Marquises 